He demanded the surrender of the murderers, with a thousand fathoms of
wampum for damages; and not getting a satisfactory answer, he attacked
the Indians, killed a score of them, seized their ripe corn, and burned
and spoiled what he could. But such reprisals served only to enrage the
red men. Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort, complained to
Endicott: "You come hither to raise these wasps about my ears; then
you will take wing and flee away." The immediate effect was to incite
Sassacus to do his utmost to compass the ruin of the English. The
superstitious awe with which the white men were at first regarded had
been somewhat lessened by familiar contact with them, as in Aesop's
fable of the fox and the lion. The resources of Indian diplomacy were
exhausted in the attempt to unite the Narragansett warriors with the
Pequots in a grand crusade against the white men. Such a combination
could hardly have been as formidable as that which was effected forty
years afterward in King Philip's war; for the savages had not as yet
become accustomed to firearms, and the English settlements did not
present so many points exposed to attack; but there is no doubt that
it might have wrought fearful havoc. We can, at any rate, find no
difficulty in comprehending the manifold perplexity of the Massachusetts
men at this time, threatened as they were at once by an Indian crusade,
by the machinations of a faithless king, and by a bitter theological
quarrel at home, in this eventful year when they laid aside part of
their incomes to establish Harvard College.
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